All during this period, Army intelligence was conducting a massive operation against domestic protest demonstrations and circulating this information throughout the government. "In all, an estimated 100,000 individuals were the subjects of army surveillance," Senator Frank Church's committee, which looked into military spying on civilians, later reported.

Some 15 years later, Tigar filed freedom of information suits to find out what happened to his clerkship. A couple of heavily redacted documents came back from Army intelligence. "Oliver Twist won the awed admiration of his fellow orphans when he had the supreme audacity to take his empty porridge bowl back to ask for more," stated one bizarre smear memo. "Oliver apparently has a counterpart among our young radicals. In 1966, Michael TIGAR was a candidate for the post of law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. The appointment fell through when Brennan was apprised of TIGAR's left-wing background." The other memo made perfectly clear what was going on: "TIGAR may still be as radical as he ever was, but even if his political position has changed, he may find that his widely publicized left-wing activities as a young man will plague him far into the future. This is a bitter lesson many of today's young radicals may have to learn."

Tigar gradually became friends with Brennan, who said many years later he had "overreacted" in firing him.

This brief shows the slime politics played in the Supreme Court, the mendacity of the Johnson people, and, of course, business as usual for Hoover's FBI. And it reveals how military intelligence was employed to spread smears about people.

And this is precisely what Bush is in the process of re-creating, so that the two-bit snoops from the Pentagon can fan out across the nation. Homeland security boils down to the FBI's acting on neighborhood snitch watches to penetrate and track supposed terrorist groups while the military dicks spread out like a plague of locusts to spread the gossip.